tvstationsfandomcom-20200214-history
KMSB
KMSB, virtual channel 11 (UHF digital channel 25), is a Fox-affiliated television station licensed to Tucson, Arizona, United States. Owned by Tegna Inc., the station is operated by Gray Television (owner of CBS affiliate KOLD-TV, channel 13) through a shared services agreement (SSA); Gray also operates MyNetworkTV affiliate KTTU (channel 18) through a separate SSA with Tucker Broadcasting (with advertising sales handled by Tegna). The three stations share studios on North Business Park Drive on the northwest side of Tucson (near the Casas Adobes neighborhood). KMSB's transmitter is located atop Mount Bigelow; as a result of the transmitter's location, residents in the northern part of Tucson, Oro Valley and Marana cannot receive adequate reception of the station. History Tucson gained its first independent station when KZAZ signed on the air February 1, 1967. It was licensed to Nogales, but had its main studios in Tucson. The station aired movies in both English and Spanish, dramas, sitcoms, bull fights, cartoons and other general entertainment fare. It had a local news department and newscast. The station was owned and operated by IBC Limited Partnership, which was composed of out of town investors, including Danny Thomas and Monty Hall, and had its facilities in a former Safeway supermarket on Tucson Blvd., just north of Grant Road. Gene Adelstein, a Tucson resident, put together a group of investors as "Roadrunner Television" and bought KZAZ on November 19, 1976. As Bonnie Henry wrote in the Arizona Daily Star: "They held live wrestling matches in the studio, organized a paint-the-station day and ran a 24-hour Star Trek marathon that sparked a run on blank videotape." The sales manager, Hank Lominac, hosted the prime time movies. The sports anchor, Bill Roemer, anchored live sports from the University of Arizona. The hour-long newscast at 9 p.m. was anchored by former KOLD news director George Borozan and co-starred John Scott Ulm. It featured long interview segments, and its field reports were captured on one field camera/recorder. In 1978, KZAZ bought a satellite downlink and started carrying the first half-hour of WPIX/New York's newscast, which was rebranded as Independent Network News on June 9, 1980. Borozan was cut to a half hour and either followed or led into (at various times) the tape-delayed INN report. From 1981 until 1985, the station carried business news programming from the Financial News Network each weeknight before sign-off. In 1984, the station was sold to Mountain States Broadcasting, a division of the Providence Journal Company, who changed the call letters to KMSB-TV on September 12, 1985. To cut costs, Providence Journal axed the station's news broadcasts once it took over. The station became a charter Fox affiliate when the network signed on October 9, 1986, and has been affiliated with Fox longer than any other station in Arizona. As with most early Fox affiliates though, the station was essentially still programming itself as an independent since Fox offered only an hour of late night programming at the time (consisting of The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, an ill-fated talk show that locally suffered from intense competition from KVOA (channel 4)'s broadcasts of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson) and would only add a few nights of primetime programming by the end of the 1980s. In the early 1990s, KMSB began operating KTTU, which had been owned by Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia), and was allowed to move its city of license from Nogales to Tucson in 1991. Belo Corp. became the owner of KMSB after the company purchased Providence Journal's holdings in 1997. KMSB retired from cartoons at the same time; 4Kids TV aired on KTTU until its shutdown on December 27, 2008, and airs Fox's Saturday morning infomercial block, Weekend Marketplace. In November 2011, Belo announced that it would enter into a shared services agreement with Raycom Media beginning in February 2012. This outsourcing arrangement resulted in CBS affiliate KOLD-TV taking over daily operations of KMSB and KTTU and moving their advertising sales department into the KOLD studios (however, they remained employees of Belo). All remaining positions at the two stations were eliminated and master control moved from KTVK in Phoenix to KOLD. The transfer of KMSB's operations occurred in several stages, with newscasts moving to KOLD's studios on February 1 and other operations being taken over by KOLD in the following weeks. On June 13, 2013, the Gannett Company announced that it would acquire Belo. However, as Gannett holds a partial ownership stake in the publisher of the Arizona Daily Star, the KMSB license was instead sold to Sander Media, LLC, operated by a former Belo executive, Jack Sander. While the other Belo stations acquired by Sander in the deal have various shared services agreements with Gannett, Raycom Media continues to operate the two stations, and the Belo employees handling advertising sales became Gannett employees. The sale was completed on December 23. On June 29, 2015, Gannett's publishing operations were spun off, with the remainder renamed Tegna After the spin-out, Sander filed to transfer the licenses of its stations back to Tegna—a deal completed December 3, 2015. Category:Fox Affiliates Category:Channel 11 Category:1967 Category:Television channels and stations established in 1967 Category:Former independent stations Category:Former Financial News Network affiliates Category:Tucson Category:Arizona Category:Tegna, Inc. Category:VHF Category:Fox Arizona Category:Former NTA Film Network affiliates